2nd - 28th February 2001
Shigemori Residence, Kyoto
Installation view
To Fall,
To Dive
For more installation views click
Korean artist, Koo Jeong-a has been based in Paris for
ten years. During this time she has assembled around her an intricate private
world, often created from memories of her home country. Her work is typically
composed of fragments and refuse arranged in fragile and ephemeral configurations
which displace conventional modes of display found in galleries and museums.
The idea of an 'abstract house' can be identified within many of Jeong-a's
semi-architectural constructions, a concept that avoids exoticism, drawing
instead upon the everyday.
For her project, Koo Jeong-a visited many temples and
their gardens in Kyoto as well as spending considerable time at the Shigemori
Residence. Of particular significance was the Horyu-ji temple (607) edified
at Ikaruga in Nara which had an identical Korean counterpart later destroyed
by fire, a place where she could refer (or imagine) Korean-Japanese relationships
across the sea of that time.
Within the garden of the Shigemori residence exists a
stone plateau. The beautifully proportioned stone is a remnant of the Shinto
order, Suzuka, which used to inhabit the house before it was purchased
by Mirei Shigemori. Until comparatively recently, this symbolic stone was
considered the site of divinities. It will be at the centre of Jeong-a's
installation.
In Korean, 'private garden' also translates as 'uterine
space' and thus relates to Jeong-a's concept of the 'abstract house'. Inspired
by this association, Jeong-a has decided to create an architecture
of thin steel wire tracing the Shigemori garden. This fragile construction
will float like a chimera between the garden's stones hovering on the edge
of invisibility. A kind of meta garden, Jeong-a's intervention engenders
an interpretative space in which the garden can be reflected upon as a
"uterine" space.
In her project 'To Fall, To Dive',
Jeong-a wishes to elicit the viewer's imagination and to draw upon both
the individual and collective memory of the garden; a place that for her
seemed strangely silent and mute in the absence of ritual.
Seminar
dialogue : Koo Jeong-a (artist) Nathalie
Viot (art critic, independent curator)
moderator: Mitsuaki Shigemori (artist, shima co-curator)
3rd February 2001 6 pm - 8 pm
Villa Kujoyama
17-22 Ebisudanicho Hinooka Yamashinaku Kyoto
Tel. +81 (0)75 752 7171
The intention of the seminar is to consider some of the
many implications raised by the Japanese landscape garden as architecture
and microcosmos. The seminar considers 'Shima' as a series of parallel
investigations, focusing particularly on the contribution of Koo Jeong-a.
Potential subjects for discussion include: artificial nature (the garden
as artifice and model), in-betweeness (between garden and architecture,
inside and outside space), micro/macro (the garden as microcosmos), framelessness
(order and contingency within the garden) and life/locus in Art (wholeness
and the implicate order).
Mirei Shigemori Residence
34 Kamiojicho, Yoshida Sakyoku, Kyoto 606-8312, Japan
Fax +81 (0)75 761
8776 E-mail shima753@hotmail.com
Due to limited access by appointment only
with the kind support of Institut Franco-Japonais
du Kansai, Japan Arts Fund, Shiseido, AFAA,
Service Culturel de L'Ambassade de France au Japon, Alliance
française d'Osaka and Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris
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